Idiocracy

Is Mike Judge's second big-screen effort too smart for the stupid people he makes fun of?

For all the success Mike Judge has had on television as the creator of the iconic Beavis and Butthead and the still-running King of the Hill, his fortunes in the movie business have been decidedly mixed. While his first live-action feature, Office Space, became a cult hit on video, his follow-up effort, Idiocracy, was the victim of studio meddling and second-guessing, with the end result being the film being unceremoniously dumped into a handful of theaters with no promotion on the way to being shoved to DVD where it could fend for itself.

Other than a profile in Esquire last summer Judge has refused to thoroughly discuss the particulars of his film's fate, leading to a cottage industry of conspiracy theories as to why Fox gave such short shrift to Idiocracy. Since lousy movies are released all the time, it couldn't have been a quality issue, but could it have been that the satiric treatment of the subject matter was too harsh for sensitive audiences to enjoy? While the true reasons for its non-release remain unknown, it is now available for us to see for ourselves if moviegoers were denied a comedy classic or spared ten bucks of boredom.

Idiocracy sets up its premise immediately by contrasting the reproductive activities of a pair of high-IQ yuppies and a low-IQ redneck with a few wives and girlfriends with which to procreate. While the yuppies keep making excuses and waiting for the appropriate time to work on a joint production, the white trash keeps piling up as the rapidly expanding family tree illustrates, filling the screen.

Meanwhile, the Army has selected Joe (Luke Wilson), an Army librarian, for an experiment to test suspended animation pods because he has tested as being absolutely average on every test and he has no family to miss him if the test went sideways. Unable to find a female solider to fit the bill, the general in charge recruits Rita (SNL's Maya Rudolph), a prostitute, from her pimp, Upgrayedd (rapper Scarface), though she doesn't seem to know or care what's about to happen to her.

Of course, something goes wrong and the pods go unnoticed for five hundred years until the literal mountain of trash they were buried in collapses in an avalanche, depositing Joe's in the living room of Frito (Dax Shepard), who is, to put a blunt point on it, a moron. (He's also a lawyer, but to mention that might be redundant.) Unfortunately, he's not unique for while Joe and Rita slumbered, the average IQ of the world steadily declined as stupid people bred like bunnies and the intelligent of the world focused on more pressing needs, like hair restoration and erectile dysfunction medicines - everything but reproducing some smart spawnlings.

The "Uhmerica" of the future is a literal and figurative mess: The language is a mishmash of hillbilly, ghetto and commercial slang; the environment is buried in trash and there is a dust bowl because the plants aren't growing; people are narcotized drones with names like Beef Supreme, watching television - the top show is called Ow! My Balls! , consisting of the star enduring one shot to the family jewels after another - and wearing clothing emblazoned with more corporate logos than a stock car racer could stomach. When Joe is imprisoned for lacking the standard identity bar code tattoo, he is able to escape by simply telling a guard that he's supposed to be let go and the idiot shows him the door.

After being recaptured and given an IQ test that wouldn't tax the faculties of a dim houseplant, Joe is determined to be the smartest man in the world and summoned to the White House by President Comacho (Terry Alan Crews), a former Ultimate Smackdown champion and porn star, where he is tasked with figuring out why the crops aren't growing. When he discovers that they've been using Brawndo ("The Thirst Mutilator" - think: Gatorade) instead of water, his suggestion to try water instead is greeted derisively - "You mean, like in the toilet?" - and the public turns on Joe; but they never really liked him, reacting to his educated patois by declaring that he "talks like a fag."

While there are many side-splitting gags - most of which I can't share on a family-friendly web site - Idiocracy doesn't build much on its premise of "the dumb share inherit the Earth." Whether it was due to the studio mucking with the final cut or Judge choosing not to explore the possibilities of the milieu, the jokes are mostly variants on the general dumbness of the future Uhmericans, which is apparently supposed to comment upon current Americans and their lowbrow tastes. (e.g. Ow! My Balls! = Jackass?)

While dumb people are an easy target, Judge makes a mistake in only working variants of this one riff. What happened to the rest of the world? How much potential humor could've been mined if Americans were now the butt of jokes told by Polish children? What if there still were some smart people in America but they were hiding their intelligence because the stupid masses would either mock them or discriminate against them? And there are a couple of gags involving planes crashing which beg the question as to who was flying them in the first place.